Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: What creates community? / NO to drugs

[Edward J OConnell (ejo]

Minority values create community. Drugs create community by uniting 
people in a common set of values, in common pursuits and activities 
outside the mainstream.

They are a rather thin organizing principle, and as such, one can agree 
that the community they foster is a little bit...cheap. The connections 
dissolve easily. For instance, when you stop taking the drug.

Pot culture (with it's intersection with Grateful Dead culture and 
general lefto counter culture) was an important part of my youth, was an 
important rallying point. At a certain point, pot stopped feeling very 
good in my body, so I stopped smoking it. I kept buying it and sharing 
it. I pretended to inhale it, like our esteemed president. 

Eventually I stopped doing even that, and my connections to those people 
that I loved, dimmed considerably. So much of the activity consisted of 
buying, finding, sharing, and commiserating on how hard it was to find, 
buy, share, that I suddenly realized that I was rather bored with the 
whole thing.

Cocaine culture, which I never really got into, was much sicker, meaner, 
and more dangerous. Less sharing. More involuntary rehabs.

Coffeeshops are the current focal point of a lot of what passes for 
community for me in cambrige at the moment. By this I mean a place where one 
actually talks to strangers who live near you.

Coffee is a drug. 

Bars are a kind of ertsatz community, too. Like Cheers, right, but of 
course, sicker.

AA is a community based on drug abstinence. (One wonders if there will be 
AA centered cohousing at some point...)

Without a doubt drugs create communities. It's just a question of whether 
you want to be a part of such communities.

I've known people, children of alcholics, for whom AA became a Church...

Jay